Micro Organisms in Recent Drug Discovery

Environmental microbes are a major source of drug discovery, and several microbial products (antibiotics, anti-tumour products, immunosuppressants and others) are used routinely for human therapies. Most of these products were obtained from cultivable (<1%) environmental microbes, and this means that the vast majority of microbes were not targeted for drug discovery. With the advent of new and emerging technologies, we are poised to harvest novel drugs from the so-called 'uncultivable' microbes. In this article, we propose how a multidisciplinary approach combining different technologies can expedite and revolutionize drug discovery from uncultivable microbes and examine the current limitations of technologies and strategies to overcome such limitations that might further expand the promise of drugs from environmental microbes.

A variety of biopolymers, such as polysaccharides, polyesters, and polyamides, are produced by microorganisms. Microorganisms are used for the biotechnological production of biopolymers with tailored properties suitable for high-value medical application such as tissue engineering and drug delivery. Microorganisms are used for the biosynthesis of xanthan, alginate, cellulose, cyanophycin, poly(gamma-glutamic acid), levan, hyaluronic acid, organic acids, oligosaccharides and polysaccharide, and polyhydroxyalkanoates.